As promised, here is the entire transcript, including Kushner’s more fully fleshed answers, and a couple that didn’t make it into print.

Question (from Sean Kennedy and Annette Westerby): What did you find out that was surprising or previously unknown while researching your screenplay for Spielberg’s new biopic of Abraham Lincoln? Do you think Lincoln was gay?

Answer: I am not going to talk about the gay stuff right now, because then it becomes sort of slightly controversial. I have definite opinions about how much that’s knowable, and how much that’s not knowable, and what we should do with what we know about it. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that question.

The research on Lincoln and the writing of the script, which have taken up a lot of the last 3 1/2 years of my life, have transformed me in many ways. Politically, certainly. It has given me, I feel, a deeper and richer understanding than I had before of how progress, even radical progress, happens in a democracy … I feel like I understand in a much, much deeper and richer way how revolutionary change was created during the years of the Civil War, and what the relationship is between government and political activity outside of government.

I’m interested in how relationships can be formed between elected officials and radical political activity on the left, which is the way that I imagine, in any democracy, that change is going to happen. It has been wonderful for to me to have all of that in my head during the election and during the first year of Obama’s presidency. It’s been a great way to view and think about Obama.

Question (from John Moore): How do you assess Obama’s first year in office?

Answer: I think it was extraordinary. I think he’s done a great job. He entered the presidency confronted with some of the most horrendous problems any president has ever faced. I think he inherited the executive branch of the federal government and Congress after eight years of what I think is inarguably the worst presidency in American history. And a presidency that I think brought us perilously close to complete catastrophe.

I think he has managed to move certain agendas forward. I am not at all impatient with the pace that he is going at. I think that what’s absolutely required right now from progressive people is a sense of discipline and a sense of practicality that we – and by we, I really mean the Democratic Party, because I don’t believe the progressive community in this country has an actual voice on the federal level.
Even as inexorably wound up in the Democratic Party we are, and slow as it is, I believe that we have to maintain some kind of discipline so that we hold on to control of the government through the midterms and the next presidential election and not blow everything out of the water through divisiveness and impatience and unrealistic expectations.

I still feel that the man is the most progressive and the most remarkable person elected to this office, probably since Roosevelt. And I hope we have the good sense not to “fink” him.

Question (from Sara Horle): What do you think of Cindy McCain’s new stance on gay marriage – in light of the fact it was likely her stance all along, and she chose not to reveal it during the 2008 campaign?

Answer: Well, of course it was her stance all along. All of these guys are cynics and liars. I mean Dick Cheney, who is a monstrous human being, behaved, in a certain sense, more decently than most because he quietly acknowledged that there was this place of spectacular hypocrisy on the right, by not betraying his own daughter. But his own daughter? And Cindy McCain? And all these other people? Nancy Reagan? There’s even some evidence that George (W.) Bush himself was basically OK with gay and transgender people, but they knew that the price of hanging onto the fundamentalist right was to pander to their monstrous homophobia and to cynically deny rights to people.

(Cindy McCain) is obviously of no interest to me whatsoever as a person, because she stood by her husband while he took a homegrown fascist like Sarah Palin and put her within a very frail heartbeat away from the presidency. And so I think these people are all unforgivable.

But she is of interest in the sense that she’s emblematic of the incredible cynicism of these people and the unbelievable gullibility of the fundamentalist right in still clinging to the notion that they are going to get what they want – an end to abortion or an end to gay rights – from the Republican Party, which is never really going to be able to deliver the kind of theocracy these people are waiting for. It doesn’t want that. But it will, however, happily prolong misery and suffering as a way of hanging on to the Reagan coalition. Which I think we are in the process of seeing is the collapse of that. I hope that’s what we’re seeing. I think if the Tea Party stuff really keeps going, it will turn into some sort of God-forsaken nativist, no-nothing populist movement that will cipher off enough of the crazies to keep the Republicans out of power for a long time.

I hope that will happen, but I don’t think Democrats and progressive people should count on it. I think we need to work very, very, very hard to not lose ground now.

Question (from Jim Hunt): You wrote this: “For every great writer, a great critic must emerge, born to fill the negative space delineated by that writer … ” The great writer you were referencing was Eugene O’Neill; the critic was Mary McCarthy. What great critic has emerged in response to your own body of work?

Answer: I’m not sure that one has, so maybe I’m not a great writer. I think it’s a fair question – and I don’t have an answer. There have been some very good critics who have decided to take an intense dislike of my work. But I think it’s sort of unfair to ask me to identify them as great critics given how much I hate them.

I don’t know that I would have ever asked Eugene O’Neill to say, “Come on, really, Mary McCarthy was a brilliant critic” – which she was – “She just didn’t happen to get you.”

There are some very smart people who have felt my plays were worthless. But I don’t think they were right about it. The whole issue of criticism … O’Neill also had George G. Nathan, who absolutely paved the way because he was basically John the Baptist to O’Neill’s dramatic messiah. There is very little criticism in this country right now that is on the level of George G. Nathan, or Mary McCarthy, for that matter.

We’re living in an age right now where there is a problem in general with serious dramatic criticism, which I think is largely gone, and has been replaced by a lot of consumer-advocacy type writing. It’s a problem because theater, given how cash-starved it is, is more vulnerable to the effects of newspaper criticism than something like film, where you have giant budgets, and tickets don’t cost much, and DVDs and Netflix are so cheap that people are willing to take risks, and they also have a gigantic audience and people have been paid up front … so it’s just a lot safer.

Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

There are certainly critics who I think are rather smart, and I’ll name one: John Simon. That puts me in the same company as pretty much most of the other playwrights of my generation and several generations before me because John didn’t like anybody, or didn’t like many people. He’s clearly a very smart man with a great love for theater who was just beastly about my work, and many other people’s work, and there are a few other people like that.

Question (from Mare Trevathan): Do you believe words are at the top of the hierarchy in American theater?

Answer: The kind of theater that I do is sort of ‘narrative realism,’ which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori’s plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist. The again ‘Top Dog/Underdog’ can be considered completely in the tradition of a play like “Long Days Journey Into Night.”

So I think I’ll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it’s gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it’s not the production. It’s not the same thing. And yes, you can describe it, and you can read hopefully good criticism about it. That’s another reason critics are important, when they are actually good. They can record for posterity what people saw when they saw this production onstage.

But the thing itself is gone, and the only thing that remains behind is the Bible. The play. The thing that makes it possible for a group of (most likely) strangers to get together and, in six or seven weeks, create an event that will then draw and engage 800 or 900 strangers for two or three hours. The play is what remains. It’s what begins and it’s what endures. It’s the only fixed thing – to the extent that it is fixed. It has its own strange unfixening because the text you’re reading is not just meant to be read. It’s also meant to be acted, so you are never comfortably in one place when you are reading a script.

But it is an enduring thing, for however long it endures, whereas an actor’s performance isn’t. So it gives it a certain kind of significance, and again the kind of work that I do, you need the text to provide the pretext for everyone getting together and making an evening of theater. And so it has a certain kind of essential quality.

And then, of course, any playwright who’s not an idiot will admit we are entirely dependent on actors, directors, designers, producers and artistic directors, so I don’t feel superior to or more important than the other artists without whom my work is literally nothing.

Question (from John Moore): But when it comes to the business of making theater in America today — do we value words above all else?

Answer: God knows I’ve had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.

In general, I think if you create a commodity forum in our society – and a play is a commodity; it’s a rental commodity – you are probably going to do better economically than if you create an ‘ineffable,’ like a stage performance. Actors now have the possibility of creating commodities. They make film, they make television, and then they get residuals. So in that sense, they are like us, if they are onstage or not.

Still, I think everybody understands that if we don’t have good plays, then a certain kind of theater that we all still seem to want to see is going to die. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but there is always an emphasis on creating support for playwrights because, without what they write, you don’t have anything.

But I don’t think anybody’s going to make the mistake of thinking that highly trained people in all of the various disciplines of theater are of different levels of value. We need the whole ball of wax … which is why we need government funding for all of this so that playwrights and stage-trained actors and stage-trained designers and directors can really get the support that they need. It’s very hard to do it. It’s a delicate and very complicated process.